Hans Loewald

Who was Hans Loewald?

Hans Loewald was a psychoanalyst and theorist, born in Colmar, then Germany. His father, who died shortly after his birth, was a Jewish physician with an interest in dermatology and psychiatry, his mother a gifted musician, who played the piano. He studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger, who enormously influenced him with his theory of language. In the 1940s Loewald came to America where he became fascinated by Freud’s theory, in which he rooted all the features of his own theory. He did not want to create a new psychoanalytic terminology, but, although he used Freud’s terms, he gave them radically new meanings. At first sight Loewald seems to be a traditional Freudian, but for the careful reader a radical re-interpreter is disclosed. Two examples of his radical conservatism will be given.